Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter_Kirk AT SIL.ORG]

Dear Rolf,

Let's look at two English sentences:

1. This morning I read the newspaper.
2. Every morning I read the newspaper.

Here, to my mind, we have two different tenses or TAMs which happen to 
have acquired the same form by some historical accident - in this case 
they are actually pronounced differently (like "red" in 1 and "reed" 
in 2).

Would you agree that the verb is a simple, perfective past tense in 1 
and some kind of present tense, imperfective and habitual in 2? Or 
would you claim that for this and a few other verbs (e.g. "let", 
"put") there is no simple past tense and no simple present tense 
(except in the 3rd person singular?!) but only one combined tense?

Similarly with Hebrew. Simple yiqtol and jussive have the same form in 
many cases, but they remain semantically distinct. True, one needs the 
context to disambiguate them (a strong argument for a discourse 
approach, in my opinion), but this does not mean that speakers thought 
of them as synonymous.

Could it not be that the one form weqatal represents two originally 
quite distinct tenses or TAMs which have come together because of some 
phonological mechanism or Masoretic regularisation but retain distinct 
meanings?

Peter Kirk